Giving Student Athletes a Voice

Linda Greene is the Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the Distinguished Visiting Lee Chair in Constitutional Law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago. She is a co-founder of the Black Women in Sport Foundation.

Updated July 30, 2014, 2:27 PM

Today’s college athletics conferences are engineered to maximize television contract revenue, not to make mathematical or geographical sense. You remember the Big Ten? It's still the Big Ten, but with 12 teams. You know the Big 12? It's still the Big 12, but with 10 teams. And we can’t forget the Big East’s westward expansion, or the Southeastern Conference, with Missouri and Texas A&M now included. It’s complicated!

Players have not been given their say. They deserve a seat at the table when conference alignment is being negotiated.

What’s not complicated is the television contract revenue that these new conferences will generate. Conferences gain money from networks formed to broadcast their own games, and from networks like Fox and ESPN that pay conferences for the rights to broadcast those games. The recent realignments in college football are a step toward national conferences with bowl-like match-ups on a weekly basis. That’s exciting – and lucrative. ESPN, FOX and other networks currently pay close to $2 billion for TV rights. During double-digit unemployment and foreclosure despair, who can complain about this bright spot?

Student athletes can. The football players have not been heard, but they have plenty to complain about: They work 60-hour weeks, risk brain trauma, live below the poverty line, and dream unrealistically of playing on Sunday. The National Collegiate Athletic Association, the organization that sets the rules for college sports competition, rejected pay for college athletes but this year authorized its members to pay student athletes a $2,000 stipend over room, board, and tuition. This half measure is not only an attempt to avoid infraction investigations involving minor sums. It is also an acknowledgment that college football is big business and that the student athletes keep it running. In the super conference environment, there are powerful incentives to ignore the interests of student athletes. They deserve a share of the proceeds of their labor. And they deserve a seat at the tables where the terms of future conference alignments are determined.